Kick Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

good when it arrived. It wasn’t something you’d want to smell every day, but when the air is ripe with the aroma of what was formerly inside of a kid, red sawdust was about as welcome a smell as fresh home-baked cookies on a rainy day. That is, until it was dumped on top of the vomit, where the two opposing fragrances would battle for superiority and produce a tangy, sour bouquet, like a pungent French cheese gone horribly wrong in the back of a hot car.
    As a kid, I never knew why janitors always used that red sawdust or where it came from. Years later, when I was working in the warehouse at my father’s store, I learned that it was actually a manufactured product called sweeping compound, and was made to both soak up spills and keep dust from going into the air as you swept a dirty floor. Not knowing this back then, I figured that the red sawdust was just something the janitor had found lying around in the wood shop and decided was as good a substance as any to camouflage a puddle of throw-up. Because he had to do something so that we kids didn’t have to look at it. All school professionals know that if one kid sees another kid’s throw-up, that kid will then also throw up. And then another and another. Throwing up is contagious. One kid with a nervous stomach can set off a chain reaction in a crowded classroom that could seriously deplete the world’s supply of sweeping compound.
    I never understood how my peers could throw up so easily. To me, throwing up is about the worst thing that can happen to a person. The stomach-twisting retches. The complete lack of control of one’s body. The hellish sounds of air being forced through the upwardly traveling bile. To this day, I think I’d rather die of food poisoning than have to throw the tainted food back up. I think I’ve only thrown up about three times in my life. But never in school. Things were bad enough without adding regurgitation to my list of problems.
    My most vivid experience with throw-up happened in the second grade. It was show-and-tell day, and I had brought in a brandnew Hot Wheels fire truck that I was dying to show off and tell about. That truck, which I had wanted for months, was everything I had dreamed it would be and more. Bright red and so new that all four wheels were still straight. They hadn’t had a chance to bend inward yet like Hot Wheels cars always did after a few play sessions, so that when the car was rolled, it would simply go into a spin and tip over. No, this Hot Wheels fire truck was pristine. It even had a little ladder that you could move up and extend out. I’d been trying to get my mother to buy it for me for what seemed like a million years and had finally guilted her into it. The day before, she had accidentally thrown my favorite troll doll in with the laundry and had turned his bright red hair pink, and I played her like a royal flush. My tears could only be stopped by a trip to the toy store and, lo and behold, the fire truck was mine. And now I couldn’t wait to impress my peers with it.
    The teacher, Miss Drulk, had gone out of the room for a minute, and I was busy making the truck race to the scene of a fire on my desktop, complete with screeching tires sound. I was good at sound effects and was convinced that no one could do the sound of a car getting into an accident and blowing up better than I could. True, I couldn’t do a machine gun as well as my friend Gary, and when it came to helicopters, Stephen Crowley was the king. But when it came to automobiles, the rest of the class could simply step aside. I was the master.
    As I sat there, lost in my own noisy world, making the truck go into a catastrophic slide that saw it heading for a fall off the side of my desk—where it would then burst into flames in super-slow motion—Chris Davis, a perpetually dirty kid who sat behind me, tapped me on the shoulder.
    “Hey, Paul, that’s a neat truck. Can I use it for show-and-tell?”
    What? I thought. No way. This